Your friend Jim George thinks you'd be a great addition to Ricochet, so we'd like to offer you a special deal: You can become a member for no initial charge for one month!
Ricochet is a community of like-minded people who enjoy writing about and discussing politics (usually of the center-right nature), culture, sports, history, and just about every other topic under the sun in a fully moderated environment. We’re so sure you’ll like Ricochet, we’ll let you join and get your first month for free. Kick the tires: read the always eclectic member feed, write some posts, join discussions, participate in a live chat or two, and listen to a few of our over 50 (free) podcasts on every conceivable topic, hosted by some of the biggest names on the right, for 30 days on us. We’re confident you’re gonna love it.
What a terribly depressing story. Thank you for sharing it.
Every time I think about getting more involved in politics, I remember the Republican party… Our local party head is no one I would like to know better, and the state Republicans can barely find candidates here in NY.
Even though the NYY TIMES for goodness sake was reporting on our governor’s corruption and malfeasance, there was barely a squeak from the GOP… and the governor handily won re-election…
Thank you. This is excellent, and deserves widespread dissemination.
Republicans often run things as if top-down command-and-control socialism was ideal. In other words, they say conservative things, but are instinctively liberals. Which is why it is no surprise that, once they achieve power, they rarely resist the siren song of deciding to “fix” America rather than sticking to campaign promises, and just leave us alone.
A great example of what you describe was the “My GOP” initiative of a few years back. The idea was for Republicans of all walks of life to have their own “pages” on a site that explained why they were Republican.
Unfortunately, too many of them advocated “private” social security accounts instead of the focus-group approved “personal” accounts, thus allowing for the possibility that we might look bad. They shut it down.
I knew a Democratic equivalent of what I was in 2008. She had innumerable resources within a very de-centralized “whatever works in your area, do it” structure. We know how that election went.
In terms of policy, Democrats are terrified of what people might do if left to their own devices. That’s how the GOP is when it comes to politics.
I too volunteered for a Republican call center. They wouldn’t even let me make a single call. They had me data entering on the masterpiece and never to be functional data base. I am at an age when I had to take my glasses on and off to enter data.
This post was spot on. The campaigns are being run by people who are certain they know what they are doing.
The state party is disfunctional, the national party backs candidates who don’t understand anything about the state, and requires those candidates to follow a script which cannot win in our state. It is a MESS.
I am comforted that Republicans in some other states seem to know what they are doing. Some of them like Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker get elected and do the job they promised to do.
My state hasn’t seen a Republican in a state wide position in the state government for twenty years.
Now that is telling. What an indictment. You don’t want to say which state you worked in? Really, just as a favor to anyone contemplating helping out in the future.
I read a few articles last night about McConnell’s treatment of Ted Cruz, and thought, maybe I’m done calling myself a Republican.
This is one of the most stunning posts I’ve seen on the Member Feed. It really helped me to understand what’s going on.
I hope it will be widely read.
And they wonder why Trump has appeal.
He fires people who don’t perform in their jobs.
I still wonder how much the 2012 consultants got paid for ORCA.
I was an ORCA volunteer in our local polling location. It stopped working 15 minutes after the polls opened. Maddening!
Lest anyone forget…Ace of Spades “The Unmitigated Disaster Known as ORCA” http://minx.cc:1080/?post=334783
Why are you trying to get Hillary elected?
Good insight into a dirty little secret. there is no such thing as an expert in things broadly human. There are experts on Rubin or Dali, et al as all their paintings are already painted, they all exist in the past so it is possible to know the universe of Dali paintings. Economics, politics, sociology take place in the future and the future isn’t knowable. There are specialists and some of them have been around long enough, read widely enough and experienced enough to also bring wisdom to their specialty. The political experts I see seem to be pollsters, bag carriers from the last election and young and all of them are human.
If you really want to know, send me a message and I’ll tell you.
Thank you very kindly. Unfortunately, I’ve come to the conclusion that anyone who reads it that might actually be able to change things would probably just consider me disgruntled and therefore unreliable.
I’ll cop to being disgruntled, but I am telling the truth.
Basil, pretending that Republicans can do no wrong does not help the party or our country. If posts like these identify the problem, then we can try to fix it going forward.
Actual expertise in “things broadly human” requires a degree of humility, for people have freewill and all sorts of quirks that will throw you for loops. If you accept you can’t ever really understand people, you’ve a much better chance of becoming an “expert” on them than one who thinks he’s got us all figured out.
The mindset I encountered in State GOP was the opposite of that.
Ugh. Thank you for sharing. My only hope is that there is a range of competency in different state operations, and maybe, hopefully, please please please…you just happened to work at the worst. But this explains SO much. Including why the left has such an easy time stereotyping us.
I am 96.5% sure that Basil was being sarcastic.
The number of candidates running is the legacy of ORCA – a bloated, corrupt Republistocracy creates the environment for various electorally transmitted diseases.
OMG! You are so right about the call scripts. I always just figured they were written by people who had no [bad word] idea what they were doing and had never made a [another very bad word] phone call themselves.
I always ignore them (the call scripts). Nobody ever says anything because they’re afraid I’ll tell them to [physically impossible lurid act involving the telephone] and walk off the job.
I don’t even know why politicians think phone calls do anything other than irritate the voters. I suspect it’s because a pol running for office just wants everything he/she can get. I would think spending the time and money on additional flights of direct mail would be more effective. Laugh if you want, but while direct mail may be old school, old tech, like a Model 1911A it’s still deadly in the hands of someone who knows what he or she is doing. Like getting the message out directly in the hands of the voter instead of relying on a press release.
Phone calls are so useless in fact I decided in 2014 I was done phone banking. That leaves walking precincts which I’m not enthusiastic about because nobody’s ever home anyway. Although I do need the exercise.
The candidate I was working for was, alas, very mediocre (Darlene Senger, Illinois 11, vs. Bill Foster in case you wondered). I attended a forum and while a Carly Fiornia would have had him pinned to the mat and dissected, Senger let him get away with saying the most stupid things (including his support for the Iran Deal which was in the process of being hatched).
“The Stupid Party” is a well-deserved epithet.
And the pizza is always the cheapest they can find.
The people you are complaining about are the Republican party. The question is when are you going to wake up and either stop complaining or leave the party. People have been self identifying as non-Republican in increasing numbers and the GOP approval rating has been dropping like a rock. Perhaps it is time to join with true conservatives.
Can you convince me that this won’t result in America becoming a permanent, one-party (Democrat) state?
Thankfully my volunteer work with the county party was nothing more than manning the sign closet for an afternoon. I had a thoroughly enjoyable time chatting with the other volunteers and the folks who came in for yard signs, but I don’t know that my efforts had even the smallest blip. My letter to the editor writing (and debating in the comments) for a particular candidate probably bore more fruit.
You are absolutely correct that the party machinery is archaic and unsuited to the task at hand.
This was excellent, hopefully people like Rick Wilson read it and take it to heart.
The point of Angelo Codevilla’s book is that it will be regardless of who ends up running the machine.
Obama may have helped kill off the kind of “expert” you describe.
I was once a lobbyist. (I am in recovery, thank you.) In pre-Gingrich days, the House GOP wanted a modest share of pork, the occasional futile principled stand and a lot of congratulations for being bi-partisan (i.e., capitulation). They were mostly genuinely nice people who sucked at hardball politics, eloi to the ruling Democratic morlocks. Many senior GOP “experts” are from that culture.
The only threat to those people were the crazy Goldwater-Reagan types who threatened to take their party away. They fought them more fiercely than they did Democrats.
JFK reached out to Ev Dirkson and Charlie Halleck even though he had the numbers to ignore them . In contrast Obama refused to offer even figleaf concessions to the GOP minority and now that they are in the majority he just pretends they don’t exist. He is making it almost impossible to gracefully capitulate in time-honored GOP fashion because he is so utterly graceless. He is forcing choices to which GOP “experts” are congenitally hostile.
Post-Obama, post-Trump GOP politics may be characterized by a new candor and a willingness to confront issues in a manner foreign to GOP “experts” and create a new political ecosystem in which they will die out. We can hope.
From what I gather reading his stuff, Rick works for campaigns, not the party organization. My experience was that the individual campaigns (though certainly not all) are somewhat better organized and functional, but their Achilles heel is having to rely on the party for certain resources.
My own experience at the county level leads me to believe that a big issue is that the party is staffed, at all levels, with older people who are set in their ways and completely out of touch with culture and technology. It may not even be the script writers who are all screwed up but rather those who request and approve of the scripts.
On the whole, I think we look at the party in the wrong way. It is a tool we should be using to disseminate conservative ideas and elect conservative politicians. Sadly, however, the party has become the ends rather than the means to desired ends in many locations.
And let’s not forget the priority of money in all this. Want to play, you gotta pay. Join the county party, pay the dues. Join the state party, pay the dues. Join the national party, pay the dues. Be a delegate at the state convention, buy your plate and pay your way there. Become a delegate to Cleveland next year, that’ll cost you. The only people with the money to be this active are either retired and thus old, or too busy making their way to retirement to have time for it. I’d get more involved, but I can’t afford it.
I am 97.2% with you on that.
Agree. Famed screenwriter, William Goldman, says about Hollywood: “Nobody really knows anything.” His point being that if anybody really knew how to make a hit movie, they would only make hit movies. And nobody only makes hit movies. It’s all just educated guesswork.
I think that wisdom applies to JP’s point above. Like movie-making, politics is a broad subject with a whole lotta moving parts. And despite what the “experts” claim to “know,” I suspect they are guessing just like the rest of us.
Maybe. And then Ricochetti criticize Cruz for criticizing McConnell – and it does not seem sarcastic at all.